Thursday, December 18, 2014

While listening to this great track, I couldn't quite remember what GRIMES song he's based "Heartache" on:It took Googling "GRIMES swinging a sword in the desert", but I found it: The original is called "Genesis":Jump to 1:10 in the video for the core of the song.
Also came across this: An excellent 8-bit rendition of Genesis. I don't usually go for chiptunes, but this is unlike most chiptune tracks that lean too heavily on midi or that ear-piercing Gameboy-reverb. Check it out:Other versions are availble on the artists Bandcamp:Grimes 8-BIT by FrankJavCee

A friend shared this gem with me: a rave for kids. Jump to 1:03 for something pretty wild looking.
I couldn't help but compare it to what my Elementary school Grade 8 dances sounded like back in the day. This is going to date me, but my memories of those didn't have any electronica, but instead featured Live - Lightening Crashes:

Thursday, October 9, 2014

A reoccurring favourite artist of mine who goes by Memory Tapes (and occasionally Weird Tapes) released another eclectic mix set:

https://soundcloud.com/memorytapes/blue-to-green-mixWhen I met the artist during a small concert in Toronto, he commented that nothing on the internet is permanent. It exists, then is gone. For that reason, he rarely keeps his mixes posted for very long.If you like this, or any of his other listed mixes via SoundCloud, be sure to save them offline using a any number of websites.

This came across my SoundCloud dashboard this morning, and it's wonderful.Pearl White difficult to peg what genre it is, and it's all the better for it. I'm hearing some elements of trance, trap, and various other electronic dance genres - but it also has some pitch-shifted vocals and spooky synth happening (mixed with urban-dance vocals? ok!) that remind me of Purity Ring, or random Witchouse bands--minus the "triple-clap" sound.The general vibe is a multi-genre, futuristic distopian background music. Some of that might come from how the EP is mixed together into a single set:https://soundcloud.com/pearlywhite/white-ep

Wednesday, August 13, 2014

Years ago, I came across the music artist Tobacco at a tiny Toronto record store. I bought the last copy of a CD of his (right out of the CD player), but haven't heard it in a while.I was pleased to find out some vintage footage was mixed into 30 minute long mixes of some of his music. It's well worth watching, and unlike anything except Apex Twin:Image source.

Wednesday, August 6, 2014

I decided to get in touch with TB+SA to see if they had the transcribed lyrics, and any other recommendations for similar sounding tracks they've produced:

Timecop1983 - Call on You (feat. The Boy and Sister Alma)

Lyrics
With my soft breath on the window I can trace the letters of our names
The cold air flows through the cracks of the pain
It touches my skin and I remember to always call on you in the rain
Calling to you now, just a ghost
I wanted to reach for you to pull you back to shore
I wanted to hold you in my arms, I wanted to go into the storm
But I wanted life more
You could never need me more than you did that day
Who could ever trust me to keep you safe
Breaking waves they claimed you, my feet in the sand
It's not because I didn't love you, I just couldn't swim

The Boy and Sister Alma also recommended this track from their EP as similar to the vocals on Timecop1983's track. It's wonderful stuff:

Sunday, July 20, 2014

While I've only discovered the Toronto EDM scene in 2014, I've been searching for some video that communicated the scale and effect nights at this place had. Well, I found something: a well mixed highlight video of The Guvernment events from 2013, and another from Family Day 2012. Based on my experience at shows there in 2014, this is still accurate:

Friday, July 18, 2014

Sounding like the forgotten soundtrack to an '80s Post-Apocalyptic, Mad Max-esk film, "Wastelands" is a great soundtrack-style album by Protector 101 - Released through the consistently awesome Telefutures label.

Thursday, July 3, 2014

I listened to the (excellent) original mix x8+ while driving around during the Canada Day (July 1st) long weekend.The edited set is the same as the original, but does have a few small edits, and 3+ songs cleanly removed from the mix (Cassette Club - Don't Go, Plastiscines - Barcelona (Lifelike Remix), etc) to make it more dance oriented. It's a testament to TATT's live mixing skills that the songs and beat blend as well as they do.In addition to streamlining the mix, I've added an edited version of Tim Mills - Eclipse of the Sun (Arthur Deep's Tokyo Sunset remix) to the end of the set. Enjoy.Check out the original mix and tracklist here. (Artist has free MP3 download enabled)Download the (also free) dance-oriented "July 1st" edithere (.MP3).

Wednesday, March 26, 2014

PSmag.com has a fascinating article (via boingboing.net) about how and why Sweden became the 'Hollywood' for pop and electronic dance music. In attempting to prevent illicit American pop music from overpowering local culture in the 1940s, Sweeden's funding of public arts and music education generated something altogether different in the following decades:

"Sweden, and in particular Stockholm, is home to what business scholars
and economic geographers call an “industry cluster”—an agglomeration of
talent, business infrastructure, and competing firms all swirling around
one industry, in one place. What Hollywood is to movies, what Nashville
is to country music, and what Silicon Valley is to computing, Stockholm
is to the production of pop. In fact, Sweden is the largest exporter of
pop music, per capita, in the world, and the third largest exporter of
pop overall."

[...]

"So how did Sweden, a sparsely populated Nordic country where it’s dark
for much of the year, become a world capital of popular music? Rarely
does such a complex question lead to such a satisfying answer:
Three-quarters of a century ago, Swedish authorities tried to put a stop
to the pernicious encroachment of international pop music, and instead
they accidentally built a hothouse where it flourished."

Sweedish Pop Mafia: How a culturally conservative effort in the 1940s backfired to create the greatest engine of pop music in the world.

Wednesday, March 5, 2014

When I recommended this album to a friend, the Australian artist "Empty" came to mind. BRAIDER is certainly more atmospheric, while Empty is more club-oriented. I feel they could easily share a playlist: both share the same dark, futuristic soundscape.

The instrumental music San Francisco's Scott Hansen makes as Tycho splits the difference between post-rock's melodic architecture and pop ambient's immersive, uplifting environments. Hansen's aims felt a little harder to grasp on the sprawling Dive, the 2011 predecessor of his fourth album as Tycho, Awake. The latter is a slickly constructed album that finds him streamlining both his setup and his aims — the sounds he uses and how he deploys them are more considered and purposeful.

Awake is focused on the dynamic between driving rhythms that wouldn't be out of place in M83's '80s-worshipping work and the stargazing romanticism of Ulrich Schnauss. In all of these songs, electric bass and live drums are locked on cruise control as litanies of guitar and Minimoog lines peel off in divergent, kaleidoscopic patterns. Things never crystallize into narrative song structures, but Tycho never loses the plot, offering the listener a steady succession of thematically united vignettes. In contrast to both the tension-and-release tactics employed by the likes of Mogwai and the wintry narcolepsy of Kompakt's Pop Ambient compilations, this succinct album — clocking in at just under 40 minutes — contents itself with being a seamless, vaguely melancholic reverie.

Awake humblysuggests itself as the soundtrack to a sunbaked road trip, capturing the inexplicable nostalgia you feel imagining a new life in a new town glimpsed from the highway. Transitions within and between individual tracks take place so smoothly they register mostly as changes in atmospheric pressure rather than plot points. So when the album concludes with the floating "Plains," there's a nagging sense that it has done so prematurely. Music often requires some acclimatization before it can be fully appreciated. In Tycho's case, it's returning to the real world that takes effort.

Wednesday, February 5, 2014

There's an interesting interview out with Tycho (Scott Hansen) at The Fader.Tycho is one of the few electronic artists I've followed since my university days. It's interesting to read about his changing approach to his music, in particular the difference between the production of 'headphone music' with what he called an "instagram" approach - and the cleaner, higher fidelity band-centric approach of his new record. Having experienced Tycho live in Toronto last year, I'm excited about this new approach.I've always found Hansen's music very introspective, like you're drifting through positive - if sombre - memories. It was interesting to read in the interview above Hansen's comments about his music in this sense:"...one of the beauties of instrumental music is that it doesn't define, it implies. I try to use the music as a framework for you to transpose your own emotions onto it, just like you've articulated it."I'm really enjoying the new tracks he's posted on SoundCloud (above). If you're new to Tycho's music, I'd strongly suggest picking up his previous album, Dive.On a related point, I used a few of Tycho's tracks in a mixed set I made 2012. Download here, or listen below. If you like his music, check out the track list of the mixset for similarly sounding music.

Thursday, January 30, 2014

A fellow on YouTube posted a mix that compiles 24 different Com Truise remixes.

It'd be great to hear some of these spun before Com Truise plays live at his Toronto gig (Feb 12th @ Wrongbar) this year.Also worth listening to are two Com Truise tracks originally released in his 6th mixtape series Komputer Cast ("Surf" and "Subsonic"). Polished/redone versions of Subsonic can be found in Com Truise's next EP.

Sunday, January 26, 2014

Apparently in late 1980's Belgium, there was a genre called "New Beat" which straddled the divide between New Wave european dance music and the electronica genre that would ride to popularity in the 1990s with raver culture.The 'new' aspect of the beat came from it's contrast to the HiNRG ('high-energy') sound that dominated most New Wave Dance music of the time (i.e: Dead or Alive - You Spin Me Right Round).While not specifically New Beat, this fan video for French Coldwave act Trisomie 21 certainly captures the aesthetic of the era.

Like any genre of music, there's quite a range within New Beat. A lot of New Beat sounds very much like New Order backing tracks from the '80s, while others feel like playing them will suddenly cause sweaty dude dancing in front of industrial fans to appear.The first New Beat track I heard was Tragic Error - Tanzen (in English, "Dance"). The video is beyond strange, but taps into my love of '80s dark synth dance music.

It's little wonder that Front 242's early works (including 'Headhunter') are often considered "New Beat":

It has consistently surprised me how many samples from these tracks I recognize, and how familiar the "New Beat"-beat was. For example, Pleasure game - Le dormeur is a pretty clear example of the "New Beat"-beat structure, and it sounds eerily similar to the classic "Mortal Kombat Theme song". I did some research and figured out why: the guy who wrote the Mortal Kombat theme was Praga Khan, a Belgian techno, and originally New Beat musician.
It's fun to find odd cultural connections like this - and goes a long way in explaining why this style of music seemed so familiar. I don't think I was in any Belgian dance clubs when I was 5 years old, but who can really be sure?

Saturday, January 25, 2014

I've meant to post about Bow Church, or "b()w ( hur ( h" in that bizarro ascii-style - or a few weeks now. Regardless of how you write the name, I'm thoroughly enjoying their mix of predominantly instrumental, Witchhouse-esk, crunchy dark electro tracks.

Tuesday, January 14, 2014

I first encountered TimeCop1983 on Soundcloud with a demotrack titled "Slow-synthpop3". It's since been replaced with the polished/extended version "Childhood Memories":

An interesting mix of instrumental analog/digital synth sounds comprise his work. Be sure to check out the EP "Synthetic Romance" he's released via Bandcamp - a nice blend of synthy, futuristic sounds reminding you of a future that never was.